Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not
Brian Lamb
TheWayItWasMeantToBe
Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realization that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way.
—Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web
Remember when the Internet was about opening up access to information and breaking down the barriers between content creators and content consumers? Think back to when spam was just a meat-like substance. To those heady days when Timothy Leary was predicting that the PC would be the LSD for the nineties. Before the DMCA. Before eBay. Back when the Web was supposed to be a boundless Borgesian “Library of Babel” and not a global supermarket. Forget that the dot-com era ever happened—if you were an investor or working for stock options back then, maybe you already have.
In 1999, the World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee looked back on the previous decade and lamented: “I wanted the Web to be what I call an interactive space where everybody can edit. And I started saying ‘interactive,’ and then I read in the media that the Web was great because it was ‘interactive,’ meaning you could click. This was not what I meant by interactivity.” That vision of a genuinely interactive environment rather than “a glorified television channel”—one in which people not only would browse pages but also would edit them as part of the process—did not disappear with the rise of the read-only Web browser.1 It’s churning away more actively than ever, in a vivid and chaotic Web-within-the-Web, via an anarchic breed of pages known as “wikis.”
TheStandardWikiOverview
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
—Charles Mingus
It’s risky to talk about wikis as if they’re all the same. In practice, the term wiki (derived from the Hawaiian word for “quick”) is applied to a diverse set of systems, features, approaches, and projects. Even dedicated wikiheads engage in perpetual arguments about what constitutes true wikiness. But some fundamental principles (usually) apply.2
· Anyone can change anything. Wikis are quick because the processes of reading and editing are combined. The signature of a wiki is a link at the bottom of the page reading “Edit text of this page” or something similar. Clicking that link produces the page’s hypertext markup, allowing instant revisions. Authoring software, permissions, or passwords are typically not required.
· Simplified hypertext markup. Wikis have their own markup language that essentially strips HTML down to its simplest elements. New users need to learn a few formatting tags, but only a few. Most wiki tags significantly streamline and simplify their tasks. For instance, the minimum HTML code needed to create a named hyperlink to EDUCAUSE Review online, <a href=”http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/”>EDUCAUSE Review</a>, would be rendered in a wiki within square brackets. The result, [http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/EDUCAUSE Review], saves a minimum of twelve keystrokes and is significantly easier to remember. Raw URLs typically require no markup tags at all to be rendered live on a wiki page.
· WikiPageTitlesAreMashedTogether. Wiki page titles often eschew spaces to allow for quick page creation and automatic, markup-free links between pages within (and sometimes across) wiki systems. Linking to related pages is easy, which promotes promiscuous interlinking among wiki pages.
· Content is ego-less, time-less, and never finished. Anonymity is not required but is common. With open editing, a page can have multiple contributors, and notions of page “authorship” and “ownership” can be radically altered. Content “cloning” across wikis—sometimes referred to in non-wiki circles as “plagiarism”—is often acceptable. (This attitude toward authorship can make citations for articles such as this one a tricky exercise.) Unlike weblogs, wiki pages are rarely organized by chronology; instead they are organized by context, by links in and links out, and by whatever categories or concepts emerge in the authoring process. And for the most part, wikis are in a constant state of flux. Entries are often unpolished, and creators may deliberately leave gaps open, hoping that somebody else will come along to fill them in.
There are plenty of exceptions to each of these principles. Wiki practices sit on a continuum. At one end is the radical openness and simplicity of the wiki inventor Ward Cunningham’s first system: the WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki), which was launched in 1995 and has remained remarkably true to its minimalist vision. But as wiki usage grows in popularity with other online cultures, even being touted in the business world as a knowledge management solution, scores of emerging wiki systems are adding functionalities such as restricted access, private workspaces, hierarchical organization, WYSIWYG Web editing, and even integration with centralized content management systems. On this more structured and feature-rich end of the continuum, it can be difficult to decide whether these are really wiki systems at all or are simply browser-based HTML authoring tools.
WhyWiki?
A community is like a ship: everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
—Henrik Ibsen
In many respects, the wide-open ethic of wikis contrasts vividly with the traditional approaches of standard groupware and collaborative systems. Access restrictions, rigidly defined workflows, and structures are anathema to most wiki developers. What’s unique about wikis is that users define for themselves how their processes and groups will develop, usually by making things up as they go along.
Newcomers to the medium may find it easiest to start with simple tasks. Wikis work great as shared online sketchpads or as spaces for brainstorming. They are perfect for creating perpetually updated lists or collections of links, and most users can instantly grasp their utility as informal bulletin boards. Because it takes only a couple of seconds to set up a new page, no purpose is too trivial.
One common way to use wikis is to support meeting planning: a provisional agenda is drawn up, and the URL is distributed to the participants, who are then free to comment or to add their own items. Once the meeting is under way, the online agenda serves as a note-taking template, and when the meeting is completed, the notes are instantly available online, allowing the participants or anybody else to review and annotate the proceedings.
With some planning, more complex processes can easily be supported. A number of varied applications have been defined by heterogeneous groups from within my home institution, The University of British Columbia.3
· The Faculty of Applied Science Instructional Support links wikis into its course management system authoring environment so that design teams can quickly and collaboratively build reference lists and outlines, brainstorm instructional strategies, and capture suggestions. Educational Technology Coordinator Jim Sibley reports: “The ability to spawn whole sites or a series of pages astonishes people when they first see it. . . . You can quickly map out pages to cover all aspects of complex processes or projects.”4
· The Career Services unit uses wiki pages to store and organize content for a major new job posting and career development Web site that it is developing. Discussion and prototyping can get under way immediately rather than waiting for the technical framework to be implemented. Online content creation is able to proceed rapidly, with contributions from every member of the unit rather than from simply a handful of Web authors. Laural Raine, a Web developer, notes: “Using the wiki has allowed us to share and collaborate on the research that we would have otherwise done individually. This allows for easier information management during the project, and will improve the quality of our finished product.”5
· An academic research unit on campus used a wiki for planning a technoculture conference—to collect supporting resources and to gather contributions from invited participants. They used the wiki during the conference, live, with laptops and wireless access, to record group work. Following the conference, participants subsequently edited their collaborative authorings from a wide variety of locations, resulting in a “conference proceedings” of an altogether different sort. The organizer, Professor Mary Bryson, observes: “[The] wiki functioned in this context as an intellectually appropriate technology, aesthetically and politically in keeping with the theme of the event, which was the significance of ubiquitous media in everyday life and the ways in which accessible tools mediate the construction of popular culture.”6
· Teresa Dobson, an assistant professor of education, is using the wiki space in both her teaching and her research. Her graduate course on technologies for writing employs the wiki as a support for collaborative experiments in composition and “as a prompt for reflection on the nature of online writing and reading.”7
What is most remarkable about these diverse outcomes is how they came about. In all instances, the users decided for themselves how the wiki would fulfill their objectives. Technical support and training was minimal: at most, one hour of instruction was needed, and in most cases, orientation was handled by a single e-mail. Even confirmed technophobes have grasped and mastered the system quickly. The structure of wikis is shaped from within—not imposed from above. Users do not have to adapt their practice to the dictates of a system but can allow their practice to define the structure.
And as open systems, wikis can extend their reach far beyond departmental or organizational limits, expressing the interests of virtually any community. For example, Wikitravel (http://wikitravel.org/) is striving to develop a free worldwide travel guide. TV Tropes (http://tvwiki.sytes.net/) bills itself as “a catalogue of the tricks of the trade for writing television scripts”; it collects frequently found plots and devices and helps its members to find “a cliché to subvert.” JuggleWiki (http://www.jugglingdb.com/jugglewiki/) offers tips and animated tutorials, allows jugglers to meet one another, and is home to just about anything else conceivably associated with juggling. Rick Heller, an author, has uploaded the manuscript of his novel Smart Genes (http://www.opensourcenovel.net/) and will incorporate the best edits and suggestions into the next draft of his book. Readers can also save alternative chapters and related pages.
It’s possible that wikis might simply represent the latest advance in online interaction—a cost-effective and readily adopted knowledge management tool. But as wikis make their mark in higher education, the ultimate implications may prove to be far more profound than mere gains in efficiency.
TheStandardObjection
Editing is the same as quarreling with writers—same thing exactly.
—Harold Ross
There’s a very common reaction that newcomers express when first introduced to wikis: “That looks promising, but it can’t work for me.” Their objection to wikis is nearly universal: “If anybody can edit my text, then anybody can ruin my text.” Human nature being what it is, to allow free access to hard-earned content is to indulge open-source utopianism beyond reason.
This concern is largely misplaced. Think of an open wiki space as a home that leaves its front door unlocked but doesn’t get robbed because the neighbors are all out on their front steps gossiping, keeping a friendly eye on the street, and never missing a thing. This ethic is at the heart of “SoftSecurity,” which relies on the community, rather than technology, to enforce order. As described on the MeatballWiki: “SoftSecurity is like water. It bends under attack, only to rush in from all directions to fill the gaps. It's strong over time yet adaptable to any shape. It seeks to influence and encourage, not control and enforce.”8 Whereas “hard security” functions by restricting access or hiding pages, wikis save copies of successively edited versions; thus, work that has been deleted or defaced can be recovered with a couple clicks of the mouse. Changes are readily detected (e-mail or RSS alerts can announce page edits), and deleting flames or unconstructive contributions is usually easier than creating them.
It’s undeniably true that determined vandals can make real pests of themselves. But an open environment also encourages participation and a strong sense of common purpose, so the proportion of fixers to breakers tends to be high, and a wiki will generally have little difficulty remaining stable—assuming that people see value in its existence and have a genuine interest in keeping things tidy. As Clay Shirky observes: “A wiki in the hands of a healthy community works. A wiki in the hands of an indifferent community fails. The software makes no attempt to add ‘process’ in order to keep people from doing stupid things.”9
The open-access encyclopedia Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org) is, without question, the biggest and best-known wikiThe open-access encyclopedia Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org) is, without question, the biggest and best-known wik project on the Web. It has such a huge and active contributor community (having created more than 290,000 entries in English alone as of June 2004) that a remarkably elaborate governance structure and conflict-resolution process have emerged to handle the often-contentious construction of entries, particularly in the case of hot-button issues such as “abortion” or “Iraq.” The Wikipedia Meta-Wiki proudly describes the present power structure as “a mix of anarchic, despotic, democratic, republican, meritocratic, technocratic, and even plutocratic elements,” all in constant flux and in perpetual negotiation.10
In the case of Wikipedia, establishing community policies is complicated by its relatively high profile and the diversity of perspectives and motives. Most contributors sit somewhere on a range of “extreme inclusionists” (who value every article that isn’t obviously awful, in the interests of creating an evolving representation of online culture) and “extreme deletionists” (who value “proper” articles, in the interests of building an authoritative reference work). This online Tower of Babel resolves its many differences in varying ways across the system. In most cases, “Darwikinism” holds sway—with sections and sentences “subject to ruthless culling and replacement if they are not considered ‘fit.’ ” In practice, however, “evolution toward stability occur[s] just as much through cooperation as competition.”11 This complex, fluid set of mores and norms marks Wikipedia of great interest to researchers at the IBM Collaborative User Experience Research Group, who have used Wikipedia’s authoring processes as the raw material for their work “visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors” and examining how the community responds to instances of vandalism.12